


Arrnan, The Maze Keeper

by Notsalony



Series: Earth-95 [4]
Category: DCTV, DCU, Earth-95, Flash High, Original Fiction - Fandom
Genre: Character Development, Complete, Cross Over, Earth-13 - Freeform, Earth-95 - Freeform, Fished, M/M, Multiverse, One Shot, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 20:12:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10704252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Notsalony/pseuds/Notsalony
Summary: You met Arrnan in Chapter 4 and 5 of Flash High, see more of his life in this stand alone side story.





	Arrnan, The Maze Keeper

**Author's Note:**

> So... I’m doing side stories that may or may not have anything to do with the actual plot line, but popped into my head and might help you understand more about the character. If you want MORE of any of these stand alone side stories, give them love and comment about it. Because otherwise I wont know.

  
  
I am Arrnan of the Thaine Empire.  I was born on a world you have never heard of in a universe that no longer exists.  Lost to a bloody and violent war with beings who are beyond Gods and capable of bringing life into being on a whim or wiping it out just as quickly.  I was chosen by my people in our last effort to escape the brutal decimation of our multiversal matrix by the Arkrellians to try to start a new Thaine homeworld in a new universe.   
  
Life on Varstein III wasn’t bad.  I had a typical Thaine upbringing.  My father went out and purchased the same kit every other Thaine’s parent choose when he was ready to had an offspring.  Everyone in the neighborhood knew what it meant when you went out and purchased a blue orb.  I’ve seen it.  Even owned one myself once.  Roughly eight inches in diameter, metallic blue with a gloss finish.  All one solid outer shell.  And like we learned in school, he went to the privacy of his living room, turned on the blue orb and it generated a special vacuole.   
  
While most standard vacuoles that we Thaine use are a hyper dimensional virtual fluid particle suspended in a higher dimensional lactic which allows it to be shaped, usually into cuboid planes to shape a cube like shape and are electric blue in shape, those come from black orbs.  A blue orb generates a red vacuole.  It’s roughly twelve inches in dimension, and has one passable side.  I assume my father did what all healthy teal blooded Thaine do when they use the blue orb.  He took off his trousers and slipped both of his tubes into the passable side of the red vacuole.  Thaine are single gendered.  We’re all male.  And long ago we learned that our dual tubes that hang from our groin, when milked properly inside the red vacuole, retrieves the right amount of genetic material and liquid argon from our bodies to generate a new born Thaine.   
  
I woke to consciousness inside the red vacuole, floating in the air as my father did up his trousers and put me in the incubation pod.  My sub-cranial implants were put into my forming body and my nervous system was wired to my implants allowing me access to the outside world through the digital network we had built across all of the universes in our matrix.  I was accepted into school with trillions of other Thaine who had been born as I had that day, and while we were in our incubation pods, we learned and studied, finding what we were predisposed towards.  I learned I was a purple Thaine.  My father had been a traditional gold Thaine, his body mostly blue with gold markings, while mine, was mint green with purple markings.   
  
This meant that my randomly sequenced dna had predisposed me to adaptation, evolution, and using a little understood element of our universe.  When I was removed from my pod several days later, a youngling fresh to the world I was taken to the purple’s school.  Here I was with the other purple Thaine who were being trained in how to use our genetic gifts.  My father being a gold had gone to a uniform overview school where he was trained to be an orb constructor.  I would spend hours pouring over his manuals and learning his trade even though he often scolded me for stepping outside my cast.  I think he was secretly proud that I treated him as a source of pride for me.  Since he did the same to me.  In a way I understood that I’d elevated his status in our world.  Golds were the most common of all Thaine subclasses.  Accounting for almost 96% of all Thaine births.   
  
Purples were among one of the rarest if not the rarest subclass of Thaine, as well as one of the most sought after offspring.  And most of that had to do with the disciplines we could achieve.  While my father would only spend his life building orbs of various colors for other Thaines’ use for the rest of his life.  I was being trained to utilize my adaptive genes.  The first study was to determine who was capable of doing the most basic of purple Thaine abilities.  We were to phase shift into all nine forms of matter.  I had a basic understanding of becoming a fluid or a gas.  It was dropletron and ferifluids that gave me trouble.  Half the class was taken away after the months long testing process for private tutelage.  They’d shown remarkable promise in phase shifting that they were being tapped to focus on that already.   
  
The next stage was testing our adaptational ability and capacity.  I was taken to a vacuole and the atmosphere was vented.  I passed out the first time, but I’d grown a new lobe to my lungs that allowed me to breathe my own atmospheric waste products as atmosphere, and I’d kept breathing.  Some had grown pressure organs, and a few had simply adapted to not require an atmosphere to stay alive.  Those who had adapted to effectively not breathe were taken away to be taught in a focus of  their adaptational skill.  I was slightly bummed that I didn’t make the cut for this level but I was taken back to the barracks and told to rest before my group went through a new factor test.   
  
The next day I was taken to work with the most rare and volatile substance we’d found in all our matrix.  Mana.  Unlike most universes where they have a health connection to the sources of mana, my universe, my entire multiversal matrix, hadn’t been built by the makers.  We didn’t know that at the time.  But part of the branching event that created us was a distinct lack of mana in our universe.  It prevented biodiversity from being a factor in our shared evolutionary processes.  I remember the first time I saw mana.  This wispy purple stone the size of a small bead sitting in a solid vacuole all by itself on a pedestal.  The Thaine who brought me in was wearing a dangerous chemical clearance suit and sat me in the room with the stone.  I was instructed to touch it.  I’d learn later that no two Thaine interact with mana the same way.  But the second I touched it my body adapted.   
  
I absorbed the stone into my biology and doubled over silently screaming as every cell in my body was undergoing mutation and evolution.  Rapidly accelerated because of the mana.  Half the students have no reaction or barely a reaction, and a fourth will actually die on exposure.  But me... I was in the other fourth that had an extremely ‘positive’ reaction to the mana.  When I woke up I was still in that isolation vacuole and several suited scientists were studying me.  I remember on instinct wanting them to back up and they were flung across the room.  I’d passed out from doing it again but when I woke up that time I was alone in the barracks.  I was told that the others had all been placed into their assigned positions, but that I was a unique case.  An anomaly in the data set.  Others had tried absorbing or adapting to the mana.  I had instead altered my body to actually produce mana in limited quantities.  I was capable of doing something they called magic.   
  
I was just beginning my studies when the war broke out.  The leaders selected the best and brightest from every program to be evacuated while the rest were went as cannon fodder to give us time to escape.  I watched people I’d gotten to know through the program fighting and dying as large eyeless beings strode through our world tearing at the seams of reality and destroying my home.  We were each allowed to bring our parent with us so I was glad to have my father with me.  We were evacuated to a far out universe and I began my training with the greatest mana scientists.  Learning the basics about shaping mater and altering things with my mana.  And as we progressed, we learned that the more I worked with it, and the harder I studied, the more I could do.  It was like my body was adapting to the limits and going behind them, evolving past my limitations.   
  
The evacuation bought us six years of hiding out before someone in the upper leadership finally told the truth about what had happened.  The makers of the multiverse we’d split off of, had come to our core world to meet with our people and learn about us.  They’d left the meeting and slaughtered everyone on the planet, hell the entire universe of the seed world was sterilized.  And with the destruction of our seed our multiverse began to collapse.  Our entire multiverse was doomed.  And it was the first time I can recall seeing my father set his work aside and find no comfort in it.  It was a few days of despondent loss before I got word that they wanted people like me to start trying to defend worlds.   
  
My first posting was in a world that we were barely keeping what little ground we had.  Me and twenty other recruits were taken to a world that had once been a habitat world and was now a two hundred mile wide war zone.  I remember the fear I saw in their eyes as we landed and our vacuole shut down.  The feel of the way the ground didn’t feel right under my feet, like it wasn’t solid enough.  We were on a world too close to the fractures in the matrix of our multiverse.  The laws of physics were beginning to break down here.  But as I moved along I felt something else.  I felt a pull of something.  It felt like something inside me was being pulled towards something else.  Something out in the midst of the fighting.   
  
I was supposed to be on guard duty.  Report to the line.  Walk the line.  Check for breaches.  It was so simple.  But I took two steps out of the posting office and instead of going straight down the line... I turned to my right and walked out into the battle field.  I could faintly hear their screaming for me.  Frantically trying to call me back.  But I walked through the mine fields, and the spacial charges, the fissures in reality and the cracks in time and I walked right up to a dying Arkrellian bleeding out on the battlefield.  He’d been trying to summon up the strength to remove his injuries.  And he’d been calling on the mana in his blood, but it wasn’t enough.  The call had stretched, trying to summon the biggest concentration of mana to him... and he’d called me.  I felt him look at me in shock.  And I reached out and I touched his face.   
  
The connection was made.  And it didn’t matter that I had less mana then him, that I was less trained.  Or that he had been doing the pulling.  All that mattered was I was more alive then he was and I had the strength to pull back and drain his mana out of his cells.  He died, but the connection lingered for a few minutes.  I was kneeling there in the fog of our weapons fire digesting a life time worth of memories from an immortal who was older then my entire multiverse.  I felt an explosion go off and the warm spray of someone’s blood raining down on my body.  And in that moment of revulsion for this war and what we’d become I dug into that mana pooling in my blood and I cried out with a nameless fury and with that primal scream everything stopped.  The fog was blown away, and we were all there, stopped where we had been, our weapons frozen in time and space, the weapons fire still in the process of happening, but every person could move.   
  
In the stark light of day I could tell it was Thaine blood covering me and Arkrellian blood on my hands from the body at my feet and I wept as I felt all of it.  Felt all the death and destruction around me.  And in that moment I was done.  This war was done.  I might not have the power to finish this across all of time and space in my multiverse but I could end it here and now.  I drove my hand into the fractures, the fissures, the breaks in every aspect of this universe, and I wove it around my being and I pulled with all my strength.  And in that moment I saw it.  A word.  A single word.   
  


Vøx’ān’reľ’thül’nèx’va’œ’sõľtå’ma’ġaņą’sől’teç-

  
  
It was a single word, but it meant everything.  It was a trace of the seed that made our world.  Each seed world was a single word in the Arkrellian mother tongue.  Created from a singular idea.  And that seed would spread and alter and change and add definition.  Each choice we made that altered and created whole new universes inside our matrix was just another diacritical mark and additional sounds added to a singular word.  This world’s word was missing part of it.  Corrupted by the damage from the loss of the seed.   
  
And I realized in that moment what was missing.  The word for our seed wasn’t apart of this word anymore.  With out it it would unravel and tear at itself like a rend in a piece of cloth would slowly work itself loose.  I could feel the shift as the ç started to unravel and I stopped it.  Holding it where it was.  I’d seen this world before.  We’d had lessons about it in the incubation pods.  This was one of the most lovely worlds we’d found and we’d patterned all our habitat worlds on it.  I put a hand on the Arkrellian corpse and dug through it’s cellular memory.  Down to the quantum cells of it’s being and read every world it had ever been on, reading them back and back, looking for one that had the seed in it.  It wasn’t there.  I reached through him to the other Arkrellians.  Reading their history back and back till I found the same word, the same seed word amongst them.   
  
“ŗǿk’vǻ’ńůr.” I felt the word roll out of my mouth and felt the flare of power it had here.  The air stilled and the weapons fell to the ground, everyone was looking confused.  “Vøx’ān’reľ’thül’nèx’va’œ’sõľtå’ma’ġaņą’sől’teç’ŗǿk’vǻ’ńůr!” I shouted in a quake of a voice that shook everything in the entire universe as the rends mended and space restored itself around this point in space time.  But that was only for a brief moment before the blinding flash.  When I woke up I was in an isolation vacuole and the leadership, their grey skin and red markings looked at me with curiosity.   
  
“What did you do?” One of them looked at me with almost a mix of awe and fear.   
  
“What do you mean?” I frowned.   
  
“The reports say you walked off duty, into the heart of combat, you killed an Arkrellian...”   
  
“He was already dying.”   
  
“You _found_ a dying Arkrellian.” He amended.  “Then you did some sort of magic, froze the fighting, and then you screamed out some sort of complicated word that most people said came out almost like a roaring wind... and you banished everyone from that universe.  And from what our scans have told us, you utterly repaired that universe into pristine beauty.  But erected the same shield around it that the Arkrellians had around our seed world.  Only they can’t get into this one to study it anymore then we can.” I blinked at him.  “Habitat Prime is sealed off from everyone.  Perfectly restored to how it was before the war, but no one is allowed in.”   
  
“How’d you do it?” One of the other’s looked nervous.   
  
“He wanted the mana in my blood.” I closed my eyes.  “The Arkrellians have mana in their blood.  It allows them to do magic and wipe wounds away like they never happened.  He was trying to do that, but he needed more mana... and it called me to him.  He was too far gone or he’d have probably killed me for my mana.” I opened my eyes.  “And I used his mana and his knowledge to see beyond the physical into a meta dimension of our existence, beyond subatomic and quantum states, and into the language they used to build the seed worlds.” I looked right into the red eyes of the leader who had amended his statement of facts.  “I saw that every universe is a single word to them.  A permutation of the core word that sits at the center of our multiverse.  I searched them, all of them for the part it was missing.  The seed word.  And once I had that I said it.  And when I did... everything acted like it was coming together.  So I said the full word of that universe we were in.  And when I did, it banished everyone off of it, sealed it off, and restored it.”   
  
“So it’s a matter of learning their language.”   
  
“You don’t understand.” I shook my head.  “I tapped into them.  I read the entire history of every world, ever universe, multiverse, and matrix they had ever been in, down to their home world outside it all.  I saw all of it.  And for a moment I realized that I was a child using borrowed words.” I looked disgusted.  “We can’t learn their language.  We can’t use their weapons.  We can only make a choice.  Stay here and fight till we die.  Or find a way out.” I looked far away for a moment, looking at the differences in this universe’s word from the one I’d last been awake in.   
  
“And how do you propose we ‘find a way out’?” The one with the red eyes asked.   
  
“My dad builds orbs.” I looked at him suddenly.  “If I had enough of the words that I could some how... Inscribe into the casing of a vacuole orb... I might be able to create a vacuole that’s capable of leaving one matrix and going into another.”   
  
“What do you need for this plan?”   
  
“I need to go to the outer most worlds, the inner most ones that still stand, I need as many Arkrellians as we can find... and I’m going to need a power source strong enough to ...” My mind went blank for a moment.  As if some part of me was answering my questions for me.  I’d been trying to work out how big a power source I needed, everyone stood there looking at me and I finally spoke.  “I need as many vacuole cores as you can get me, something to write with, and an empty universe where if I screw this up I wont kill anyone but myself.”   
  
“What are you planning.”   
  
“To create a power core capable of making it into what ever the hell is on the other side of our matrix.”   
  
“You’ll have it.”   
  


***

  
  
What followed was the longest two years of my life.  Traveling between worlds, gathering their words, getting a sense of the language and the mutations of it as it spread and getting the technology together to build a basic theory.  My father designed the sphere we would use.  It was roughly the size of a vacuole itself.  Twelve feet in diameter the sphere was massive.  Etched into the entire casing surface was words, strings and strings of words I’d gleamed from the various worlds and battles I’d walked into.  And it was finally down to simply turning the bloody thing on.  The only problem was a power source.  So once I wrote out the last of the explanation of how to make this prototype work, I was flown to an abandoned universe and given the power cores I asked for.  I worked alone, drawing symbols and lines of power I’d seen used in one of the Arkrellian minds I’d touched.   
  
I divided the power cores into six piles around me and sat in the middle.  I reached into the core of my magic, and touched the damage to this world.  Weaving myself into it, I began talking, a running dialog in Arkrellian and some other language weaving in and out of them as I wove the magic together.  I was almost done when I realized what the final step of this spell was.  I had to change the name of this universe, change it’s word into the seed word.  It would create an unheard of amount of power that would be bound into the generator.  I reached through to the word at the center of this place and I wiped it away.  Seeing the empty space where it was and feeling the disruption of every atom in this universe I replaced it as I spoke.  “ŗǿk’vǻ’ńůr!”   It was like riding a wave of water and quick sand as it rippled in and out of itself.  When I opened my eyes, there was a power core sitting in front of me, but I was sitting in a forest with no trace of civilization anywhere in sight.  I wondered what choice had caused our splitting off, but I didn’t have time to ask.   
  
“Are you there?  Arrnan, are you there!” I heard Valx’s voice.  In the two years since we’d met that red eyed leader had been glued to my side through thick and thin helping me get what I needed.  We’d started courting sometime ago.  But I knew he’d been worried of what would happen if I failed.   
  
“I’m here Valx.  I have it.”   
  
“You have it!”   
  
“Yeah.  I need extraction.  The Arkrellians are likely to figure out that I changed this world into a seed world.  They’ll be trying to wipe it out before it can restore our matrix.  I need out of here now.”   
  
“Understood.  Picking you up now.” There was a pop and the black sphere of the transport came to rest in front of me.  I picked up the power core I’d created and put my hand on the sphere.  It activated a vacuole and pulled me out of that universe.  As I was escaping I could see heavy cruisers heading towards it to investigate.  I had done something they didn’t know we were capable of.  I’d fixed what they’d done to our universe, if only for a short time.  And now I had a means to possibly escape.  The trip back to my father and to Valx was short but worth it.  I hugged them both and went into the lab.  I opened the casing and installed the power core.  Hooking it in, I closed the casing and put my hand on the sphere.  The words began to glow faintly blue, brighter and brighter as a vacuole formed around the sphere, then more.   
  
It soon had a massive ship sized vacuole formed with it at the center, all in all it was probably twelve foot tall with a length of ninety or more feet and could hold hundreds of us.  I powered down the sphere and looked at everyone involved.   
  
“We have a prototype.  And the technology is in place to build more of the spheres.  We have a few already ready, I just need to make more power cores.... but let’s test this theory first.” I looked at the two most important men in my life.   
  
“I’m going to do any tweaks that are needed.” My father stepped up.   
  
“I want to see this through.” Valx walked up and stood with us.   
  
“Get a jump team ready.  I’m going to do some last minute checks.”  An hour later a jump team of seven other Thaine were there and we were in open space headed towards the farthest point of our multiverse.  I felt the tightness as we approached the boarder.  We stopped at the edge, looking at the fluid point where reality was being born, but no new realities were being born.  It was distinctly empty at the edge.   
  
“With out the seed our choices aren’t branching out anymore.” Valx looked at the vast empty space and I could feel the despair in his heart.   
  
“We’ll find another place.  A place they wont find us.” I hugged him.   
  
“We’re ready to test the vacuole sir.” One of the men came up to me.  I nodded and walked to the control room we’d set up around the sphere.  I looked through the walls and turned back to plot a course.   
  
“This should take us out.”  They nodded and took over the movement of the ship through space till we crashed against the barrier.  The scrapping was harsh on the ear but we didn’t take any damage.   
  
“What happened?” Valx looked at me.   
  
“We’re missing a part.” I looked out into space and felt for something.  A memory, an echo of a ghost of something from one of the Arkrellians I had touched flitted across my mind.  “Dad, can we make the vacuole walls project text?” I turned to him.   
  
“I suppose.  It’s the basic technology we use when we use tablets and projectors.  But why would we...”   
  
“Because it’s not enough that the engine is using the words to get here... we need to be covered in the words.  I... I think the Arkrellians project a song of words across their hulls while they travel to sheath their ships and protect them from what ever is on the other side...” I frowned.   
  
“Do you know the words?” Valx looked at me.   
  
“I’m going to try.  If it’s wrong the wall wont let us through and we can go back home.”   
  
“Okay.” Valx nodded.  I knew he needed a win.  I didn’t know why... but I knew it was important that he had a win here.  I set about designing the words that needed to be projected, and as I wrote them, my father programmed them to scroll across all the surfaces of the vacuole in one continuous stream of a song.  It took a couple hours but when we were done it was a constant flow of information across our outer most layers.   
  
“Try it again.” I nodded to the men on the helm.  They nodded back and took us in.  It wasn’t perfect, there was some turbulence, but we made it out.  And into a constant screaming howl of something that seemed to be everywhere at once.  The walls of the vacuole were threatening to collapse and I reached out with my magic to reinforce them.  I nodded to the helm and they took us on a trip farther out.  We were collecting as much information.  With any luck, next time we got here it wouldn’t be this bad.  But thirty minutes later I had to signal to head back.  I was getting weaker and it was all I could do to hold it together, I had to pilot us in by hand because our navigation helm couldn’t lock onto anything here.  But once we were back in our own reality I passed out.   
  
I’d over taxed my system and it took weeks before I was able to walk again from the strain.  My father came to visit me and explained they’d built fleets of core spheres for the massive vacuoles.  They’d been working on a means to daisy chain them together so that we could stick as close together as possible.  The howling we’d encountered was caused by a quantum wind that never ceased in that place.  We’d ended up thousands of light years from where we’d exited and we’d never noticed till we came back in.  He was working with the best vacuole engineers to create a better reinforcement for the skin of the vacuole.  I asked about Valx and found out he’d used this victory to secure a seat on the highest part of the council.  I’d probably not see him as often.  I feared what this would mean but was too weak to fight it.  That night he arrived and his guards stood outside my room while we talked.   
  
“I’m proud of you.” He stroked my cheek.   
  
“And I of you.” I touched his cheek.   
  
“I’m on the ruling seven.” The pride was in his voice, but his eyes were sad.  I let my thoughts reach out to him and I felt it.  He was pulling away from me.  He’d likely make sure this was one of the last times we’d be face to face.  He felt for me... but... he wanted power and position more then he wanted me.  And I’d effectively risked his life on my bid to save our people.  He couldn’t keep risking his life like that.  I knew it in my very bones, but I knew it would take him away from me forever.   
  
“I heard.” Keeping it from my face that I knew what this was.  That this was good bye and he was trying to break things off as gently as he could.  And on some level I respected that he couldn’t do this in a message, that he felt he had to face me to break it off.   
  
“I couldn’t have done it with out you.” He kissed me and I felt the unshed tears inside his soul.  I kissed him back and he pulled back with a smile.  “Now you lay back and enjoy this...” He smirked as he moved down my body.  He wanted to go out with a bang and I let him work out how best to bring us to an end.  It was a solitary bright point in a lonely stretch of my life while I healed and regained the use of my magic.  For the next long six months I was put to work creating cores in all sorts of random universes till we had a few dozen ready to fly.  I was exhausted but we had a few ships.  I was scouting for a new world far enough away from the others to give me time.  The Arkrellians still hadn’t figured out what we were doing when we got word that someone had been experimenting with the technology for the new vacuoles and accidently slipped right out of our matrix entirely.  It was a smoother jump then we’d had and with his part of the tech he’d managed to fall back in far enough away that the Arkrellians didn’t know he’d made it.  But with that knowledge the war changed shape.  I streamlined my process for making cores, and made seven on the far side of our matrix to draw them there.   
  
I could barely stand but those added seven gave us thirty ships.  The leadership choose which worlds to evacuate on the edge of the rends and I programmed the exit vectors to target the biggest tears so that we could escape together.  All we needed was for a world to get tagged and cleared.  It didn’t take as long as we’d thought, we only had time to get sixty thousand of us on the ships before we took off.  I found out later that the leadership had chosen who was going and who was staying.  And my father and I were picked because of the need for us on this project in case anything went wrong.  Valx was on his own ship.  The leadership was scattered across every ship in the fleet, to give us a better shot at survival if something happened.  And in one final push we went for it.  We never saw the fleet of Arkrellian war ships standing guard till they were firing at us.  I managed to make a make shift spell that got us free of them and over the months we spent crossing the divide to the next matrix... I learned my father’s ship had been one of the ones blown up.  I still had a box of his things with me.... I’d been meaning to ship them to his vacuole.  But with it’s destruction.  I now had a handful of things he’d saved from our lives.   
  
I was alone on a vacuole carrying two thousand Thaine.  And as we entered a new matrix to try to figure out what was coming next, I had never felt more alone in my life.

**Author's Note:**

> I will be doing a chart series that explains how this all wraps together. So... keep a look out for that. Also, anyone who can SAY those words, record yourself saying it. I want to hear how that sounds. -grins-


End file.
